Runaway (17 page)

“Have you ever run away?” Maddy asked.

Kristi snorted. “Is the Pope Catholic? I was out my window every other week, it seemed.”

“Why did you want to leave home?”

Kristi was quiet for a moment. “You know how it is. Dad comes home drunk, looks for something to hit. After Mom left, his favorite target was gone, so he started picking on me.”

“Where’d your mom go?” Maddy asked.

“I don’t know. I woke up one day when I was twelve and she was gone. I don’t blame her though.”

Maddy thought that was unlikely. What kind of mom leaves her kid with a drunk, violent father? And what kind of person wouldn’t hate her for doing it?

“I hung around as long as I could ‘cause I have two little brothers. But as soon as they were big enough to take care of themselves, I left for good. My father never whipped the boys, but anyways, they got big enough to whip him right back.”

“So how old were you when you left for good?”

Kristi paused again. “I was sixteen.”

“Well, there you go.”

Kristi raised herself on one elbow and looked at Maddy. “I’m not going to worry about whether you’re too young to be away from home. I know you’re not. I’m just worried that David will leave you behind when we head out to Idaho.”

“Do you think he’d do that?”

“I don’t think he would. But Drecker might talk him into it. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”

Kristi got up and found some MREs in the footlocker. “Do you want spaghetti and meatballs or beef stew?”

“Um, beef stew?”

“Good choice.” She brought the MREs to the table and showed Maddy how to warm up her stew with the heater in the pack. She set out the crackers and cookies and plastic forks and arranged it all as if they were sitting down to eat at home just like anyone else. “Look at this! They give you toilet paper in these things, and instant coffee, and blueberry cobbler. This ain’t too bad.”

Their stews burbled in their flameless heat packs while Maddy considered how Kristi seemed to make every obstacle something to be enjoyed. She wanted to be at least a little like that. She’d take some of that joy with her blueberry cobbler, please.

After dinner, Kristi built a fire while Maddy went out in the dark to use the outhouse. She carried the sputtering kerosene lamp with her, but one peek in the outhouse and she headed for the woods to squat there instead. The outhouse wasn’t foul smelling, but it was terrifying. She heard scrabbling and scurrying when she opened the door. The woods in the dark were terrifying too. She peed as fast as she could and ran back to the cabin, where the inside looked cheery. Kristi was sitting cross-legged in front of the fireplace, poking at the logs with a stick and whistling. Maddy sat next to her. All they needed was some s’mores.

“Why’d you come with me, Kristi?” Maddy picked up a stick and started poking at the logs too. Their sticks clacked together in the fire.

“I wanted to make sure you’d be okay,” Kristi said. “You looked scared.”

“I did not.”

Kristi looked at her with a smile. “Please. You might have been able to hide your age from me, but there was no mistaking that look on your face. But hell, I’d have been scared too. That Drecker dude is intense.”

“So you wanted to what? Protect me?”

Kristi shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I just wanted to be with you.”

Poke, poke. The flames danced higher and licked around their sticks. Kristi put hers down to take off her jacket. Then she picked the stick up again and stared very intently at the fire.

“What do you think of that?” Kristi said.

“What?”

“That I wanted to be with you?”

Maddy stilled her stick now in the fire and the end ignited. She shoved it the rest of the way into the flames. “I don’t really know what you mean.”

“I have to be honest with you. Do you know what the worst thing is about knowing you’re sixteen?”

“Almost seventeen.”

“It’s that I was starting to have feelings for you, and now I know you’re just a kid and it makes me feel like an old letch.”

This was the kind of news that came as no surprise when she heard it, yet she had completely failed to anticipate it. Kind of like realizing no one was going to ask her to the prom and the dance was that night. But this surprise from Kristi cut the opposite way. It pleased her. She felt startled in a way that made her stomach feel funny. She looked at Kristi, who was still poking at the fire.

“I don’t think you’re an old letch, Kristi.”

“Well, you wouldn’t. But people my age or older would. And I’m not one who’d take advantage of a kid. That would be wrong.”

They sat for a while longer with the fire. Maddy felt unwilling to say anything to Kristi, afraid the wrong thing would come out of her mouth, because she wasn’t sure what the right thing would be. Finally, as they were getting ready to turn in, she touched Kristi on the arm.

“Thanks for being honest with me, especially since I haven’t been honest with you.”

“That’s okay. Did I freak you out?”

“No. But let’s talk about this when I’m seventeen, okay?”

A big smile broke out on Kristi’s face. “You’re on.”

*

“It’ll be dark soon,” Catherine said. “I’m not sure how much farther we should go.”

Jan peered ahead. The dense woods were getting close to impenetrable. They didn’t have the benefit of a trail to guide them, nor a known destination. Jan led the way, picking out a route roughly parallel to the trail she’d seen Drecker travel. They hoped it would somehow burp them out onto the area where the training group was gathered. She used the compass on her phone to keep them moving in the same direction, but then they didn’t really know if that was the right direction. Jan stopped.

“You may be right. Let’s get back to the car and see if we can tail Drecker from the parking lot. I can hardly see a thing anymore.”

They turned and headed back toward the car. Catherine moved through the woods as if she lived in Sherwood Forest instead of London, and stayed behind Jan in a clear acknowledgement of who was leading the search. They both turned when a beam of light bounced off the broad tree trunks in front of them.

“Looks like you ladies have taken a wrong turn somewhere.”

A broad-shouldered man in cammies stood twenty feet away, a flashlight in his left hand, a nine millimeter in his right, both raised and pointing at them. He walked slowly forward.

“This is private property, ladies. You may have noticed the No Trespassing signs everywhere?”

Jan stood in front of Catherine and shielded her eyes from the beam of light. “It seems we missed seeing those,” she said. “But I’d appreciate it if you’d lower your flashlight. And your gun, while you’re at it.”

The man did neither. “I’m afraid all I’ll be doing is escorting you to our commanding officer. He was especially interested to see if there were ladies snooping in our woods. Damn if he wasn’t right.”

He moved to within three feet of them, holstering his flashlight, but keeping the gun aimed at chest level. Catherine moved to Jan’s side as he pulled two plastic handcuffs out of his back pocket, but before he’d even moved his hand past his hip, she had him on the ground, with her knee to the back of his head and his arm twisted up behind him.

“Jesus,” said Jan. She picked up the gun that had been knocked from his hand. “Do you need any help there?”

The man started to struggle and Catherine wrenched his arm higher up. He howled.

“Yes, if you could put one of these cuffs on him I’d be ever so grateful.”

They both sat on him and wrestled his hands together, cuffing them with the plastic strip. Then they stood and rolled him over. His face was scrunched up with fury.

“You bitches will pay for this. My sergeant will be out here any minute looking for me.”

Jan looked down at him and shook her head. “That’s going to be awfully embarrassing for you, isn’t it? I mean here we are, a couple of ladies, as you put it, and there you are, trussed up like a pig. I wonder what he’ll think about that?”

The radio on the man’s belt crackled and a voice came through asking him to report in.

“Just turn it off,” Jan said. Catherine grabbed the radio and hit the power button. “Now, you’re probably right that he’ll be coming along soon to find you. My question to you is whether you want to have us wait for him with you, which we’re just fine with. Or would you like to help us out and we’ll let you go before he sees us? Which will it be?”

“Or we could just knock him out or shoot him or something. That way we can have his sergeant find him and we could ambush them.” Catherine leaned down and looked at the man’s shirt pocket label. “Does that sound like it would be less embarrassing for you, Private Lawson?”

“He’s kind of old for a private, isn’t he?” Jan asked Catherine.

“A little. It’s probably been hard for him to advance.”

“Fuck you!” Lawson said. He tried to spit at them, but the glob landed back on his head.

“That’s the spirit!” Jan said. “It’s thinking like that that’s probably gotten you where you are today, Lawson. But listen, we’re running out of time here. All I want is to show you a photo and you tell me whether you’ve seen the person before.”

She grabbed his flashlight and pointed it at the photo of Maddy, holding it in front of his face. He turned his head away.

“Does that mean you haven’t seen this girl, Private? Or that you have.”

“I ain’t seen her.”

“May I?” Catherine asked Jan, as she took the flashlight from her. Then she jammed the flashlight up against Lawson’s scrotum and pushed. He tried to scramble up on his feet, but Jan held him down.

“I’m afraid you’re not being entirely honest with us, Private Lawson. Now, you can tell us what you know, or I can push harder.”

His eyes were wild as he stared at Catherine. Jan saw him look up at her for salvation.

“Just tell us. It will go a lot better for you.”

Lawson was breathing heavily and looked ready to fall apart. “All I know is that half an hour ago they ordered us to break camp, all of a sudden like, and then sent me and some of the others out in the woods to look for intruders. That’s all I know, I swear.”

Catherine got up. “What do you think?” she asked Jan.

“I think that’s about all he knows.” She took a card and put it in Lawson’s shirt pocket. “But if you think of anything else, you give me a call. If we find out you knew more and didn’t tell us, we’ll pay you another visit.”

He nodded and lay still, staring up at them. “Don’t let them find me like this,” he said.

Catherine looked at Jan and she shrugged. Catherine pulled the knife out of Lawson’s belt and cut the plastic tie binding his hands.

“Now get out of here,” Jan said.

“But what about my gun?”

“We’re not giving you the gun back.”

“Or the torch,” Catherine said.

They turned and marched back the way they came, using the flashlight in the dark woods and keeping quiet. Neither turned back to see what Lawson was doing.

They avoided the parking lot and made their way out to the county road, where they’d stashed the Jeep.

“Let’s drive by the lot to see what’s there,” Jan said.

“Excellent idea,” Catherine said.

Jan drove slowly up the road to the parking lot with her lights off, but when they came around the curve by the pond they saw that the cars and the RVs were all gone.

“Blimey,” Catherine said.

Jan laughed. “Wow. I didn’t know you guys actually said ‘blimey.’”

“We do. I can throw a ‘crikey’ into the conversation if it will get another smile out of you.”

Jan stopped smiling. She had to remind herself to resist Catherine, but it was so hard. She kept forgetting.

“I’d say they’re a pretty well organized group to get out of here so quickly,” she said.

“Except for the look of panic their bugout creates. It can’t be a coincidence that we ask about the girl and they are gone within minutes,” Catherine said.

“Time to find the sheriff, but I have a feeling we’re not going to get much help there.”

Jan looked up the contact information on the county’s website and placed the call to the sheriff’s office. Within five minutes, she’d hung up.

“No joy, I take it?” Catherine said.

“The deputy I spoke to claims there’s nothing they can do based on so little information. I’ll e-mail the photo to him so they have something on file there. He didn’t sound too eager to help out.”

“You sound like there’s something behind that.”

“When I was reading up on the militias and all the citizen patriot groups, I came across an organization of law enforcement officers called Oath Keepers who pledge to not do things like disarm the people or conduct warrantless searches on citizens. When you read their website it’s pretty clear they’re in support of an anti-government, pro-citizen group philosophy.”

“And you’re thinking that this sheriff’s department might be one of these Oath Keepers?”

“I don’t know,” Jan said. “Nothing would surprise me. But now we have to figure out a way to track this Drecker guy, and we’re not going to get any help at this point from the sheriff.”

“Good thing I took a photo of Drecker while we were talking to him,” Catherine said. “Maybe we can show it around and get a handle on him.”

Jan stared at her and found herself smiling, despite her best efforts to remain stern. “Okay. Now I’m impressed.”

“You’re impressed that I pushed a button on my phone, but not that I just took down a rather large man pointing a gun at us?”

“That? Child’s play. But thanks for getting to him before I did.”

Catherine laughed with that throaty tone that drove Jan wild. They sat in the car, both gazing out on the pond. The silence lengthened, but it didn’t grow uncomfortable. Finally, Jan started the car and pulled out of the lot.

“Let’s head into the town near here and show people the photos. Maybe we’ll get lucky,” she said.

Five minutes later, they pulled into the Country Corner store in the town nearest the camp. It was more hamlet than town, but with none of the charm that word conjures. The Country Corner was more party store than general store, its dominant display was the largest selection of scratch off lottery tickets Jan had ever seen. There were mini bottles of Thunderbird at the checkout counter, live bait next to a donut rack, and a small magazine display with the newest edition of
Soldier of Fortune
front and center. The young man at the cash register was very much like the clerk at the store she’d visited earlier in the day, only surlier.